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Changes in the American professoriate’s employment patterns and types, demographics, and work life are the greatest we have seen in over half a century.

But averages obscure the widening salary ranges on campuses, particularly between presidents and faculty members

The drive toward institutional prestige that most professors consider a high priority at their four-year institutions has intensified the focus on research there.

Peter P. Smith, senior vice president for academic strategies and development at Kaplan Higher Education, said that if traditional universities did not adjust, new institutions would evolve to meet student needs. Those new institutions, said Mr. Smith, whose company is a for-profit education provider, would be more student-centric, would deliver instruction with greater flexibility, and would offer educational services at a lower cost.

both education and research must become more relevant and responsive to society.

Others say those who take the test have little motivation to do well, which makes it tough to draw conclusions from their performance.

"Everything that No Child Left Behind signified during the Bush administration—we operate 180 degrees away from that," says Roger Benjamin, president of the Council for Aid to Education, which developed and promotes the CLA. "We don't want this to be a high-stakes test. We're putting a stake in the ground on classic liberal-arts issues. I'm willing to rest my oar there. These core abilities, these higher-order skills, are very important, and they're even more important in a knowledge economy where everyone needs to deal with a surplus of information." Only an essay test, like the CLA, he says, can really get at those skills.

"The CLA is really an authentic assessment process," says Pedro Reyes, associate vice chancellor for academic planning and assessment at the University of Texas system.

why peer review processes often avoid, rather than facilitate, sound judgment

humans do not differentiate between computers and people in their social interactions.

no matter what "everyone knows," people act as if the computer secretly cares

"If each of the five benchmarks does not measure a distinct dimension of engagement and includes substantial error among its items, it is difficult to inform intervention strategies to improve undergraduates' educational experiences,"

nly one benchmark, enriching educational experiences, had a significant effect on the seniors' cumulative GPA.

Other critics have asserted that the survey's mountains of data remain largely ignored.

"We're trying to document the role of processes that are different from standard student-outcome measures and standard ability measures,

We're interested in various types of studying, setting goals for oneself, monitoring one's progress as one goes through learning a particular topic."

Mr. Zimmerman has spent most of his career examining what can go wrong when people try to learn new facts and skills. His work centers on two common follies: First, students are often overconfident about their knowledge, assuming that they understand material just because they sat through a few lectures or read a few chapters. Second, students tend to attribute their failures to outside forces ("the teacher didn't like me," "the textbook wasn't clear enough") rather than taking a hard look at their own study habits.

Of the various ways to assess student learning outcomes, many faculty members prefer what are called “authentic” approaches that document student performance during or at the end of a course or program of study.  Authentic assessments typically ask students to generate rather than choose a response to demonstrate what they know and can do.  In their best form, such assessments are flexible and closely aligned with teaching and learning processes, and represent some of students more meaningful educational experiences.  In this paper, assessment experts Trudy Banta, Merilee Griffin, Theresa Flateby, and Susan Kahn describe the development of several promising authentic assessment approaches. 

Educators and policy makers in postsecondary education are interested in assessment processes that improve student learning, and at the same time provide comparable data for the purpose of demonstrating accountability.

American colleges are only "moderately responsive" to changes in the labor markets

In general, growth in employment opportunities and wages and demand for specific occupations do increase degree completion. But that relationship operates with a lag, with the strongest correlations occurring with a delay of four to seven years—the time it takes to earn an undergraduate or advanced degree

As a result, employers must look elsewhere to fill jobs, such as hiring skilled workers from abroad.

During the early modern period, and especially during the years 1550-1750, Europe experienced a kind of "information explosion." I emphasize the word "experience" as this is an essential element to the arguments presented here. There is ample evidence to demonstrate that during this period, the production, circulation, and dissemination of scientific and scholarly texts accelerated tremendously. In her essay, Ann Blair notes that over the course of this period, a typical scholarly library might have grown by a factor of fifty, while Brian Ogilvie demonstrates an equivalent acceleration in the production and consumption of texts in the domain of natural history; and there is a large literature to back both of these arguments up. But the fact of accelerated textual production and consumption is not what is principally at issue here. What is essential is the sense that such a phenomenon was taking place and the variety of responses to it.

She examines the varieties of textual practices "deployed by early modern scholars" in response to a perceived "overabundance of books" during the period between 1550 and 1700, and she argues that historians have paid disproportionate attention to what she calls "literary reading" and not enough to other modes of encountering and engaging textual materials ranging from browsing and skimming to buying and collecting to annotating, cutting and pasting, and dog-earing. For Blair these other modes of acting upon texts are important in all historical moments, but in situations where readers feel themselves overwhelmed by information, they become all that much more crucial and telling.

"By the 1580s," Ogilvie writes, "the botanical tyro had to master a tremendous number of words, things, and authorities." And during this period botanical literature increasingly sought to address precisely this concern. Already in the 1550s, with the work of Conrad Gesner and Remert Dodoens, Ogilvie observes a shift from an older form of botanical treatise, descended from the alphabetical materia medica, to a new form organized around "tacit notions of similarity" among different natural types. Not that all of these developments were useful. As Ogilvie notes, the move toward similarity was not a direct move toward scientific taxonomy, and in different works vastly different categorical schemes applied, so that the same plant might be grouped with "shrubs" in one and, in another, with "plants whose flowers please." Eventually, with Caspar Bauhin at the end of the sixteenth century and John Ray at the end of the seventeenth, Ogilvie notes the rise of a new class of scientific literature aimed not only at describing and organizing natural facts but at doing the same work for scientific texts themselves.

But each year, after some gnashing of teeth, we opted to set tuition and institutional aid at levels that would maximize our net tuition revenue. Why? We were following conventional wisdom that said that investing more resources translates into higher quality and higher quality attracts more resources

But each year, after some gnashing of teeth, we opted to set tuition and institutional aid at levels that would maximize our net tuition revenue. Why? We were following conventional wisdom that said that investing more resources translates into higher quality and higher quality attracts more resource

But each year, after some gnashing of teeth, we opted to set tuition and institutional aid at levels that would maximize our net tuition revenue. Why? We were following conventional wisdom that said that investing more resources translates into higher quality and higher quality attracts more resources

Richard Freeland, state commissioner of higher education, defends such partnerships, which have become a source of research funds for universities.

In California, another for-profit company, Kaplan University, has signed an agreement with the community college system to deliver general education courses online, said Peter Smith, Kaplan’s senior vice president for academic strategy and the former president of the Community College of Vermont.

cash, appears to be the single best approach for colleges trying to recruit students to volunteer for institutional assessments and other low-stakes tests with no bearing on their grades.

American Educational Research Association

A college's choice of which incentive to offer does not appear to have a significant effect on how students end up performing, but it can have a big impact on colleges' ability to round up enough students for the assessments, the study found.

he dominant teaching experience for academics is teaching an existing course, generally one the academic has taught previously. In such a setting, academics spend most of their time fine tuning a course or making minor modifications to material or content (Stark, 2000)

many academic staff continue to employ inappropriate, teacher-centered, content focused strategies”. If the systems and processes of university teaching and learning practice do not encourage and enable everyday consideration of alignment, is it surprising that many academics don’t consider alignment?

student learning outcomes are significantly higher when there are strong links between those learning outcomes, assessment tasks, and instructional activities and materials.

Christian Terwiesch and Karl Ulrich argue that group dynamics are the enemy of businesses trying to develop one-of-a-kind new products, unique ways to save money or distinctive marketing strategies.

Terwiesch, Ulrich and co-author Karan Girotra, a professor of technology and operations management at INSEAD, found that a hybrid process -- in which people are given time to brainstorm on their own before discussing ideas with their peers -- resulted in more and better quality ideas than a purely team-oriented process.

Although several existing experimental studies criticize the team brainstorming process due to the interference of group dynamics, the Wharton researchers believe their work stands out due to a focus on the quality, in addition to the number, of ideas generated by the different processes -- in particular, the quality of the best idea.

Choreography. Most organizations seek "high performance." Today, performance is no longer enough: excelling in yesterday's terms is excelling at the wrong things. This is downright self-destructive (just ask Wall Street). Today's radical innovators aren't merely mute performers, precisely executing the empty steps of a meaningless dance: they're more like choreographers. Choreographers define the steps of a better dance — they lay down better rules for interactions between supply and demand to take place.